Summer Discipline
by Timballisto
Summary: "Calcifer Uyagu,." Calcifer executed a sharp salute, clicking his heels together in a mockery of the uptight Emelan military. "reporting for duty…" Calcifer grinned wickedly at the fuming Tris. "sir." In which they meet. TrisOC


Yay! This chapter is being poster for the June submission of the KrisEleven Tamora Pierce Experiment! Whoopee!

There is a distinct possibility I will continue this fic and chronicle all of Tris and Calcifer's interactions during his summer at Discipline.

Disclaimer: If I owned this, Calcifer would be real and Tris would actually have a relationship with someone. Really, Tamora Pierce made her like... asexual or something! *Grrrr*

* * *

He could never forget what happened that day, the day he met Uncle Jeric for the first time. He had been barely five, with fluffy white-blonde hair, huge amber eyes and the naiveté of youth had been strong upon him . Calcifer remembered the front tooth he had lost the night before, and the way his mother's dumplings kept getting caught in the gap. His baby brother Huan, barely a year old, had been happily gurgling in his father's lap, grasping at the carved wood of his sweet smelling pipe.

Then his Uncle had been standing in the sitting room, dripping with rain from the fierce thunderstorm raging outside, requesting a private talk with his father. The man had been silent, dark, and brooding with a smoldering temper that showed in dark forbidding eyes under a stern brow. Calcifer had shied away from him, scared and afraid of the relative who kept looking at him with hungry eyes.

Then Uncle Jeric had left, and all was as it should have been.

He had spent his childhood years playing around mountainous forests of his home in the foothills of Janaal, taking his young brother looking for herbs to use in his Father's small herbal stall in the rustic frontier town they lived in.

Then, his Uncle had shown up abruptly again, his face worn and his eyes hollow, sunken, and greedy. His father had been upset at the sight of their uncle, and had all but dragged him away from the table that night.

Calcifer didn't know what was said, but in the end, it hadn't made a whit of difference. The next day he had been packed up and sent off with his Uncle Jeric, with barely a goodbye from his sobbing mother, stoic father, and oblivious younger brother Huan.

Another five years past and time he could have spent with the rapidly fading memory of his younger brother was taken by his cruel uncle. Uncle seemed to ignore his humanity. Calcifer was merely a tool for him to gain power, and Uncle had minced no words on the first night Calcifer had been away from home.

"_Dry your eyes boy." Uncle snarled, his dark, cruel eyes glinting as they took in the sobbing Calcifer, hunched over on the cot he had rented with his room at a roadside inn._

"_I-I wanna go home." Calcifer sobbed, his red rimmed eyes aching with tears._

"_Your parents had no choice but to give you to me." Uncle smiled nastily, his bright white teeth a shocking contrast against his midnight black beard. "Your father owed me his life you see, he had a nasty run in with a snake a while back and I was _lucky_ enough to have managed to save his life." The smug satisfaction in Uncle's voice was enough for Calcifer to infer that he had something to do with the bite in the first place._

"_W-what do you want me for?" Calcifer's voice was terrified, thinking up outrageous and disturbing scenarios of his fate with his raving lunatic of an uncle._

_Uncle snorted, whirling away from Calcifer to continue taking off his boots, taking a seat on the large downy bed that dominated most of the room._

"_I don't _want _you boy, no... Who could ever want you anyway?" Uncle's face creased in distaste._

_Calcifer shrunk back against his cot a little, feeling like he had just got sucker punched in the gut. _

"_No…" Uncle was at Calcifer's side in a few swift strides, his hand firmly clamped onto his nephew's upper arm. "But you have something I need, something that was due to me five years ago before I forced my dear brother's hand…."_

_Calcifer's breath hitched as his Uncle made a pinching motion with his fingers, drawing forth something from his chest that distorted the air as it travelled invisibly through space._

"_Ahh…." Uncle looked like he had eaten the canary. "Finally…" _

_Calcifer's vision blackened as his chest and mind imploded simultaneously. He briefly registered someone screaming- was that his voice he was hearing? - And succumbed to unconsciousness._

Out of the corner of his eyes, he could see stolen power, shimmering gold, had swallowed the small orange flicker that made up his Uncle Jeric's magic. His Uncle was _stealing _his magic.

Calcifer had only learned the source of his Uncles power barely a year before, and hatred burned like a ball of red iron in his heart. He still smiled at his Uncle and pretended he was the ignorant nephew he had been before last Longnight, when a drunken Fire initiate had let him try out some oil that allowed him to _see_. The usual stony silence and contempt his Uncle had always shown him (Now he knew that to his Uncle, he was just a _tool _after all) was still there and uncontested, but the slight hurt and eager to please attitude had disappeared and stoic hate had taken its place. He kept the same distance they always did; barely civil silence and emotional detachment. But now, he was stuck between running away and throwing himself on his Uncle in a blind rage and ripping his magic from his Uncle's greedy fingers.

Apparently, there was more to the whole 'stealing-my-nephews-magic-because-I'm-an-asshole' business, perhaps his uncle could pick up on his moods or something, because his Uncle seemingly had picked up on the whole 'I want to kill you now' vibe.

So here he was, his knapsack on his back, standing outside the gate of some nondescript cottage in Winding Circle Temple, his Uncle already halfway down the spiraling road, all alone.

"Estupído hijo de puta." Calcifer muttered, making a rude gesture to his darkly clothed Uncle's back, reverting back to the native language of Janaalan. He made sure his small act of defiance was unseen; his uncle knew lots of pain spells, after all. Shaking dark thoughts of his uncle from his head, Calcifer plucked up his courage and called out from the still locked gate, his tenor voice easily carrying from his position.

..

The first time Trisana Chandler met Calcifer Uyagu, she thought he was an ass.

She had noticed the duo walking down the road when she had been taking a second to enjoy a stiff sea breeze with a distinct lack of conversation on it (a blessing now that she had chatter in her head now as well) when she had seen a middle aged man of about thirty-five she would guess, and a boy a few years older than herself.

Her hackles had risen at the sight of the older gentleman. She could practically _smell_ the nasty perfumes he had used to slick his black oily hair back with. His goatee had been braided and he had been smiling like…like…

Like a Bag.

The merchant in her, slightly suppressed by all of the very non-merchant-y things that had happened to her over the past year, critiqued the duo.

A rich man, for certain, she decided, as they came closer. The older man was wearing a crimson tunic of silk (which she knew went for seven silver astrels a yard, plus another astrel per yard for the dye) and double woven, quality breeches (another two astrels per yard) tucked into…were those Capchen leather boots? (Those were so obscenely expensive she didn't even know the count per pair on those)

Her attention shifted to the younger one, mentally categorizing his features. He had blonde hair, she noticed. That was fairly uncommon this far west seeing as most blonds were Jalaanian and lived in the mountains far to the east, almost completely isolated from the rest of the world. His skin was light, but tanned and weathered like that of his companion. His clothing was of a lesser caliber, his light un-dyed cotton shirt slightly smudged by dirt and the knees of his trousers (They were looser, she noticed, eyeing the straight legged pants with fascination. Quite unlike the hot, often sticky summer breeches, they were made of the same loose, cool material as his shirt, dyed an earthy brown.)

Then, as they reached the gate, the older man stopped, gave Calcifer a barely perceptive gesture, and then left without looking back.

Tris frowned, but lay back. Rosethorn or Lark could get it, she wasn't going to waste her free period on him, and she had a book to finish.

"Hello, anyone home?" His voice rang through the rustling of plants in the wind from the garden and the soft cry of gulls and faint sound of waves.

Tris sighed. She could feel the pulsating thwack of Lark's loom reverberating through the house and knew that Sandry and Lark would be too out of it to respond. Briar was away on an errand to Gorse and Rosethorn… she was definitely not anywhere near the house.

Letting out an annoyed huff, Tris propped herself up on her elbows, peering over at the boy who stood awkwardly in front of the gate.

Scowling at the inconvenience, Tris knew she'd be even snippier than normal, but honestly, if they went away faster, who was she to complain?

"What do you want?" Her blunt voice broke the calm silence and his head snapped up, his eyes focusing on her disheveled appearance. Tris's scowl deepened, her cheeks flushing with embarrassment from her scruffy tunic and the deplorable state of her skirts.

The kids head snapped up and regarded her cautiously at first, then flashed with amusement. He grinned, his white teeth bright against his skin.

"You have hay in your hair."

Tris, for a second, was shocked speechless.

"W-what?" she managed. "What did you say?"

His eyes creased, shut against the sun as he continued to blindly smile. "I said-"

"I know what you said!" Tris snapped, a vein in her temple throbbing with anger as she tried to subdue the wind that had picked up around her. Deep breaths, in…out, in….out.

The kid had opened his mouth again, and she knew she would lose it if he spoke another inane and senseless word. "Don't say it." She growled, her hair frizzing with anger. "Just-what do you want?"

"I think you already asked that question." The annoying boy pointed out, his slightly enlarged canine teeth bared in his irritating grin.

"Answer the question." Tris gritted out, waves of displeasure crackling in the air around her. Inside her head, Daja, Sandry and Briar clamored for information but she was too riled to talk to them and so shut them efficiently out of her mind. Distantly, she could hear them chattering about her being on the roof, but she ignored that as well.

"Calcifer Uyagu,." Calcifer executed a sharp salute, clicking his heels together in a mockery of the uptight Emelan military. "reporting for duty…" Calcifer grinned wickedly. "sir."

"Tris!" Lark stepped out of the cottage, blinking in the bright sunlight before craning her neck to look up at her charge. "I hear voices, who is it? And what is that strange sound?"

"Calcifer Uyagu." Calcifer introduced himself again, bowing slightly to the revered weaver mage. "And I think you hear your student grinding her teeth together."

Lark glanced with amusement from her flustered charge's face to the blithe, 'innocent' face of her tormenter. "I'm guessing you're the nephew that Seer Jeric was talking about?"

Calcifer made a face. "Yeah, if he was an ass-"

"Language." Lark remarked casually.

Calcifer flushed slightly. "Er…right. Um, Uncle didn't really tell me about, uh, anything really. So, do you know where I'm supposed to be?"

"Here of course." Lark said, smiling softly. "Your Uncle arranged for you to stay here for the rest of the season while he finalizes his research with the Winding Circle mages. He maintains that we could best pay him back his favor by letting you stay here."

"He's going to stay here?" Tris moaned, her visions of a nice, uneventfully summer slipping away. "All summer?"

At Larks encouraging nod, Tris collapsed backwards, her moans of misery mixing in with Calcifer's cackles.


End file.
